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A simple illustration of the difference between old media and new media:
The camera on the left was used by C-SPAN to tape (on a separate tape deck and 8″ CRT) the appearance by Ambassador Paul Bremer at the recent Leadership Program of the Rockies annual retreat. In regular definition. For later uploading to the DC headquarters for editing and broadcast.
The camera on the right is a consumer camcorder, which we at People’s Press Collective use to broadcast events like last week’s Congressional District 4 Debate live to the internet. In high definition. And did I mention we do it live?
I’m at Michoud this week on business, and had the opportunity to visit the factory today for the first time in nearly a year.
What a change ten months can make.
While last year, the dome tooling was still mostly in place (a few of the mechanical assembly pedestals had been pulled up), most of the mechanical assembly area and associated material cribs have been cleared out, leaving behind only the more complicated tools used for NC machining of the SRB fittings. Last year, there was still a pair of LOx tanks in post-proof inspection near the end of the production line, and an LH2 tank which had just had its forward dome (the last major segment) welded on. Today, all of the weld tools (domes, barrels, ogives, and major weld) had been mothballed and wrapped up, along with the large milling machines and lathes used to trim the various segments – it was like walking through a winter storage facility filled with shrink-wrapped boats.
What impressed me the most, however, was that for the first time in twelve-plus years, I saw areas of the factory with the lights turned off.
What this suggests is that there isn’t any hardware work going on to extend the Shuttle program beyond the number of tanks currently on-hand or in final assembly. If, as rumored, NASA is directed to extend the Shuttle program, they’d better start soon if they don’t want to end up with the long gap such an extension would be meant to avoid or minimize — due simply to the time lag in tank manufacturing. And if what I was told about spares is true, it may only be possible to manufacture two additional tanks, assuming at that that everything would go perfectly and none of the spare components on order or in house have unrepairable defects or damage. With the one flightworthy tank I’m told will be left over at the end of the Shuttle program, that means an extension of at most three flights before the supply chain would need to be restarted — at considerable expense and delay.
Master Thespian John Morse, Colorado Senate Majority Leader, goes off on a rant over Amazon.com’s small act of defiance against his tax increase and privacy invasion. This is so laughable it has to be seen to be believed/appreciated:
For those who don’t know, the Democrat-controlled Colorado legislature two weeks ago passed what have come to be called the “Dirty Dozen” tax increases – blatantly ignoring the Taxpayer Bill of Rights amendment to the state constitution by raising taxes without a vote of the citizens. Among the items subjected to new or increased taxes, including soda and (some, weirdly-defined) candy, doggie bags, software downloads, and bull semen (!), are all online sales.
In the case of the latter, the tax increase mandated onerous and privacy-invading reporting requirements onto online retailers. Amazon announced early on that they would suspend all affiliate accounts for Colorado residents if the measure passed, and over the weekend made good on that promise, sending cancellation letters to all of its Amazon Affiliates in the state.
In other words, a company had the guts to stand up in a small, symbolic way to the anti-constitutional taxation policy and invasive reporting requirements of the state of Colorado – and Senator Morse won’t stand for it. How dare Amazon not meekly accept the dictates of Senator Morse and his pals in the Colorado legislature? Who does Amazon think it is?
Me? I say “Hooray for Amazon!”
What amuses me is that he is now going to ditch his Kindle, boycott Amazon, and take his custom to more statism-friendly Apple. While I applaud Amazon’s actions, I firmly believe that they will lose far more business from people like me, who will no longer purchase anything online, from any retailer, so long as this taxation and reporting law is in effect. Indeed, even though I am a shareholder and the move would cost the company money, I would have preferred to see Amazon go all the way, and refuse to accept any orders for delivery to or with a billing address in Colorado (or at the very least the addresses of the governor and every legislator who voted for the bill).
What’s not funny about Senator Morse’s dramatic soliloquy, though, is the unquestioned assumptions that lie behind it. The notion that Amazon being a $900 million “corporate customer [sic]” is something shameful, a sin that requires the redistribution of their profits to assuage. Or the assumption that the targets of an objectionable piece of legislation ought to know their place, and accept the imposition humbly without uttering a word of protest. Or the apallingly ignorant assumption that he and his equally-economically-ignorant colleagues can blithely pass tax increases without altering economic behavior in the private sector whatsoever.
What’s even worse is Morse’s astonishing and hypocritical attack on Amazon as being a “bully” and engaging in “egregiousness” and “tyranny”. Senator John Morse, Democrat of Colorado Springs, may want to look in the mirror – after all, it isn’t Amazon who is pitching an over-the-top emotional fit, it isn’t Amazon who is throwing its weight around to take something it shouldn’t have or forcing people to do business with it, and it isn’t Amazon who is acting in blatant violation of the state constitution and against the loudly expressed wishes of the citizens of Colorado.
ADDED: Senator Morse is getting called out on his BS in the comments at YouTube, and is (not at all surprisingly) responding with snippy and condescending remarks. How dare we proles question him! He’s a senator!
Despite all the hype about it being the Best Movie EverMade! and The Ultimate Entertainment Experience! and whatnot, it looks like Avatar lost the Best Picture Oscar to Hurt Locker, a movie I hadn’t even heard of until about two weeks ago.
Set aside the obvious problems with floating bags of hydrogen large enough to lift nearly 400 tons of payload over major cities, and their obvious appeal as terrorist targets, and the fact that obtaining that much hydrogen would not be as green as the creators imagine.
I want to know how they’re packaging this monster.
The windows at the lower apex suggest most if not all of the accommodations are there…which makes sense, since you want the mass on the bottom (think Weebles). But what about the hydrogen cells? Is an octahedron with concave sides really the best way to package large volumes of gas that want to assume a spherical shape? Oh sure, the thing could be fitted with conformal cells, but how structurally efficient would all of this be compared with other, less eye-appealing shapes?
On the other hand, I do like the rendering of tethered airships against the backdrop of Hong Kong – it makes me think of the floating cities from the Ringworld books.
Last night, I finally got around to watching the pilot episode for SciFi’s* new series Caprica. For those who don’t know, it’s a prequel to the recently (and horribly) ended Battlestar Galactica, set 58 years before the events of that series in the titular city.
So far, so good. After being grievously disappointed with the “reimagined” V and the unconscionable audience betrayal that was BSG’s deus-ex-machina series finale, let’s just say my hopes weren’t all that high for the show, but I was still pretty impressed.
The feel of the show was entirely different from BSG, but yet reminiscent of the feel of the flashbacks to pre-apocalypse Caprica in the last year of the show. At the same time, Caprica isn’t exactly what one might have imagined from the early scenes and flashbacks in the prior series – it’s bigger and a bit more fleshed-out now than in those glimpses. The mechanical cylon (there’s only one so far) is quite retro, yet with all the familiar elements in place – given what I already knew of the plot, I was concerned that the cylon would be a human-form one, which would have made for a very contrived explanation given the known backstory of the humanoid versions. We once again see the inexplicably octagonal sheets of paper, but this time with a twist: some of them are paper-thin computers which appear to fill a similar niche to netbooks. The settings are also familiar – though the skyline is different, the Greystone home appears to intentionally recall the similarly-sited home of Gaius Baltar in the BSG pilot miniseries. Likewise, there were a few familiar musical cues, particularly near the end when Adama’s character theme appears as the background music to the reconciliation between the young William Adama and his father, and a familiar martial theme accompanies the successful demonstration of the cylon prototype.
And like good science fiction does, it tackles some intriguing questions regarding the consequences of speculative technology. The virtual reality element is cleverly done, showing how the simple knowledge that one can do anything in the virtual world (including virgin sacrifices for entertainment) and get away with it has a corrosive effect on the outside world in unexpected ways. The metaphysical status of one of the characters is also the subject of some debate among the other characters, applying the Turing Test concept to the identity and “soul” of an artificial intelligence.
The most interesting detail, though, was suddenly grasping during one scene the delicious weirdness of two characters having an earnest religious discussion in which classical monotheism polytheism was the common cultural point of reference and monotheism was something strange and even dangerous.
So, even though it is entirely bereft of killer supermodel fembots with an anthrocidal agenda (thus far, anyway), it has promise.
* – I refuse to use their corny new spelling. It’s embarrassing.
Yeah, I know I said I was going to be posting more frequently. Unfortunately for my vow, I got caught up in the long-delayed overhaul of People’s Press Collective for most of the past two weeks. Now that it’s nearly finished (which, websites being what they are, is a Xeno’s Paradox-based perpetual condition), I’m back again.
And ye gods, I hate it when people write blog posts promising that they’ll write more blog posts. Well, other people…
Despite my relief at the Scott Brown victory, I’m going to be a voice of sobriety here: important though it may prove to be, this is one victory.
One.
Brown’s win may or may not derail the nationalization of healthcare, depending on whether Obama, Pelosi, and Reid “double down” in an all-out push to ram through their abominable bill with procedural tricks, but it could very well do so. But keep in mind that first, it should never *ever* have gotten this close in Congress, and second, the future is still balanced on a knife’s edge, even with a 59-41 Senate.
I’ve heard today’s victory called “the Scott heard ’round the world” – but like the events of Lexington and Concord this needs to be the firststep towards reining in the statists and restoring our liberty, and not mistaken by those in the grassroots who helped to make it happen as the arrival at that still-distant destination. Much work remains, what with caucuses, primaries, and midterm elections coming up, and aside from boosting the confidence of the grassroots in its efficacy in influencing major elections, this victory in Massachusetts does nothing to change that fact in other states.
Republicans, too, should avoid drawing the wrong lessons from this win – it was not an embrace of Republican policies or Republican leadership, it was for many a rejection of creeping socialism, fiscal irresponsibility, and government power-grabs in favor of liberty, and a repudiation of arrogant but clueless elitists endowed with an sense of entitlement to political office…all of which the Republicans have themselves been guilty lately. The GOP still needs to acknowledge these failings and its responsbility if it expects to rebuild the public trust, and would be wise to articulate a positive, pro-liberty platform for rolling back the nanny state rather than simply restraining the pace of its growth.
It seems the Women in Black Silent Vigil For Peace (who I last observed observing something less than a moment of silence) have given up their first-Saturday protest outside Colorado Mills in Golden…
Did President Obama end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and neglect to tell anyone (except the Women in Black, apparently)?
It looks like Al Gore, with his lucrative carbon offset schemes, isn’t the only one who may be benefitting from the “climate industry” – IPPC Chairman and former railway engineer Rajendra Pachauri (Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Economics) seems to have some interesting and potentially lucrative “climate industry” links of his own:
Today, in addition to his role as chairman of the IPCC, Dr Pachauri occupies more than a score of such posts, acting as director or adviser to many of the bodies which play a leading role in what has become known as the international ‘climate industry’.
It is remarkable how only very recently has the staggering scale of Dr Pachauri’s links to so many of these concerns come to light, inevitably raising questions as to how the world’s leading ‘climate official’ can also be personally involved in so many organisations which stand to benefit from the IPCC’s recommendations…
Initially, when Dr Pachauri took over the running of TERI in the 1980s, his interests centred on the oil and coal industries, which may now seem odd for a man who has since become best known for his opposition to fossil fuels. He was, for instance, a director until 2003 of India Oil, the country’s largest commercial enterprise, and until this year remained as a director of the National Thermal Power Generating Corporation, its largest electricity producer.
In 2005, he set up GloriOil, a Texas firm specialising in technology which allows the last remaining reserves to be extracted from oilfields otherwise at the end of their useful life.
However, since Pachauri became a vice-chairman of the IPCC in 1997, TERI has vastly expanded its interest in every kind of renewable or sustainable technology, in many of which the various divisions of the Tata Group have also become heavily involved, such as its project to invest $1.5 billion (£930 million) in vast wind farms.
Dr Pachauri’s TERI empire has also extended worldwide, with branches in the US, the EU and several countries in Asia. TERI Europe, based in London, of which he is a trustee (along with Sir John Houghton, one of the key players in the early days of the IPCC and formerly head of the UK Met Office) is currently running a project on bio-energy, financed by the EU.
Another project, co-financed by our own Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the German insurance firm Munich Re, is studying how India’s insurance industry, including Tata, can benefit from exploiting the supposed risks of exposure to climate change. Quite why Defra and UK taxpayers should fund a project to increase the profits of Indian insurance firms is not explained.
Follow the money. On the other hand, at least Mr. Pachauri didn’t take any money from Exxon – that might have called into question his scientific objectivity and the purity of his motives.
